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Health, Food and Lifestyle Wisdom
Honey:
Miracle Healing Food From Your Pantry
©2009 Susan Fekety MSN CNM
Back several hundred million years ago, I did a community health nursing rotation in Waterbury, Connecticut. In this nursing specialty, you go to people’s homes instead of insisting that they mobilize to come to you. (Particularly with elders for whom getting up and out of the house is a major undertaking, home visits are sensible, respectful, and profoundly informative, and seriously, we should do more of them.) It was a steamy, sticky summer, and one visit we made, to an elderly woman with chronic leg ulcers (blood vessel disease? or diabetes? I forget) turned out to be extra sticky as well.
This gal’s customary treatment was to gently smear her leg ulcers with honey twice a day. And darned if it wasn’t working beautifully! As a young nursing student pumped with confidence in conventional medications and “appropriate” clinical remedies, this sounded primitive, totally nuts, and even a little gross to me -- but hey, you can’t argue with success. (We see this in medicine all the time: “Don’t confuse me with facts, I know what I believe.”) (This is particularly true when people are talking about nutrition. But I digress.)
This sweet old woman said that she had tried this (her grandma’s) remedy because the medicines her doctors were offering for her legs just didn’t seem to be helping much. (Typically, ulcers like hers are very difficult to heal and eventually many of them have to be operated on, which is disfiguring and ghastly – and then you just have a NEW wound to heal, etc.) She’d started in with the honey on her own, and then fessed up to her nurse when the ulcers started to suddenly, mysteriously, improve. We checked her vital signs, made sure she had her pills all sorted out, chatted a bit, and went on to the next home.
Since then, I’ve developed a whole presentation on the medicinal aspects of various foods, and of course honey figures prominently, right up there with apples and onions and curry powder and wild Alaskan salmon. Inevitably, people have stories to tell about the honey-based remedies their vintage relatives swear by. No surprise – honey has been used medicinally for thousands of years, in a variety of different ways. The Egyptians, Romans, Sumerians, Chinese – they’ve all have had it going on with the bees. (And our civilization is offering Colony Collapse Disorder. What’s up with that?)
In New England the customary approach is to drink a little raw honey (not pasteurized) mixed with a little apple cider vinegar (not distilled white) as an overall tonic and to help digestion. This tastes much better than it sounds, particularly cold on a hot day. Try a teaspoon of each in a glass of filtered water, or maybe a little more depending on how much sugar you can tolerate. (Though it has a relatively low glycemic index (as sweeteners go,) and undeniable other benefits, honey is still sugar and should be treated with respect!) I personally like this mixed with seltzer water, for a cleansing sort of bubbly drink. Add the ice only after you’ve dissolved the honey. This novel beverage is reportedly good for everything bad that you can develop as you age. Plus it tastes good and involves no high fructose corn syrup. Or caffeine.
Honey produces a little bit of hydrogen peroxide, and also seems to kill bacteria, funguses, and viruses in ways that have not been clarified yet. (This means it’s magic.) The high concentration of sugars (fructose and glucose) give it the ability to draw fluid out of sick cells (osmotic) so they die, while simultaneously drawing moisture from the environment (humectant) to keep healthy cells intact. Honey has proven to be a useful remedy for people with stomach ulcers caused by helicobacter pylori (which are usually treated with antibiotics but some people are allergic to them or have a sensible reluctance to use them if they can get away with it) or with gastroenteritis or diarrhea. Similarly, at least one clinical trial compared topical applications of honey to Acyclovir cream for oral and genital herpes lesions, and the honey worked better to speed healing. I am not making this up.
Validating the experience of the “old wife” in Waterbury, there are several reports in the conventional medical literature describing the use of honey for wound healing and in the treatment of burns. One of my favorites showed a significantly faster recovery from surgical wound infections in women who’d had cesarean sections or hysterectomies when their wounds were treated with honey as compared to conventional therapy with antibiotics and etc. Wound infections are miserable and nasty – and expensive, since they keep you extra days in the hospital. (Plus, try learning to nurse a baby when your belly hurts like the dickens and you have a fever.) If there’s a way to fix them quicker, it should be standard procedure to try it.
Honey may even prove to be the answer to our increasingly scary problem with MRSA, or Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus. This is the germ we’re running out of good antibiotics for. Used to be that you only got MRSA if you were hospitalized, but now people who are young and robust are picking it up in the outside world. Particularly scary because we seem to have brought it on ourselves, MRSA is one of the things that keeps infectious disease doctors awake at night.
Leptospermum or Manuka honey from Australia/New Zealand is being investigated for treatment of MRSA and other infections. Manuka honey is from a tree related to the tea tree, the oil of which is a perhaps more familiar topical treatment for skin problems like athlete’s foot. You can buy it off the Internet, but I had no trouble finding a jar at the health food store. More expensive than the regular stuff, Manuka honey is dark and not as sweet-tasting as the stuff you squeezed out of that little plastic bear bottle as a kid. (Darker honey contains more antioxidants, by the way – just like darker colored fruits and vegetables.) Imagine an effective treatment for MRSA infections you can get at the market for a few bucks! Talk about health care cost control! Keep an ear to the ground on this one.
So honey, honey should be right up there on your “must have some available always” list. Some clinical trials have used plain old grocery store honey, and that’s what the lady with the leg ulcers used, but I recommend raw local honey because I like to support my local bee people, and the literature suggests that some of the potency of honey may be due to heat-sensitive enzymes. Miraculous powers of bees? You bet. It’s a gift, this “killer app” for health – so drink some, dab some, and say thank you!
©2009 Susan E. Fekety
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SUSAN FEKETY, RN, MSN, CNM is a Yale-educated advanced practice nurse with special expertise in nutrition and dietary therapies. She provides comprehensive women’s health care at True North Health Center in Falmouth, and coordinates True North’s First Line Therapy program (a clinically-proven, user-friendly program for improving health, weight, mood, and energy in men and women.) Her book of affirmations for pregnant women can be found at www.pocketmidwife.com.
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